Benjamin Goertzel wrote:
It took me at least five years of struggle to get to the point where I
could start to have the confidence to call a spade a spade, and dismiss
stuff that looked like rubbish.
Now, you say "we have to forgive academics" for doing this? The
hell we do.
If I see garbage being peddled as if it were science, I will call it
garbage.
Richard Loosemore.
IMO, one of the irritating things about academia is the incredible
passion some folks
there seem to have for calling each others' work garbage ;-p
This is not the case in mathematics (where I started as an academic) but
is definitely
the case in cog sci; where things are extremely polarized intellectually
with researchers
dividing into tribes and praising the ideas of members of their own
tribe while trashing others' ideas...
It's obvious, common, simian behavior, but I do get tired of it...
But you yourself, it seems, are not above a spot of wild
overgeneralizing (comparing one person's attack on a certain category of
poor research, even when that type of poor research happens within his
own area too, with a more general factionalism in cognitive science)?
And you are also not above making patronizing remarks in which you
implicitly refer to someone as behaving in a "simian" -- i.e.
monkey-like manner.
Notice, Ben, that I referred to certain academic works (not the people
who produced them) as "garbage".
Why do you choose to change the subject and instead begin to make mildly
offensive remarks about *people*, rather than papers?
I prefer Ed Porter's attitude, of looking for the interesting nuggets in
peoples' work
and trying to build understanding out of these nuggets, rather than
focusing on the parts of peoples' work we don't think are correct...
If you read the paper I just wrote, you will see that there is an ever
growing corpus of papers in which the whole point of the paper is to
establish a "cognitive" mechanism (which is exactly true of the two
Granger papers), but where this entire poiunt fails because the
cognitive part of the paper was weak, incoherent, etc.
The claim I made was that these papers should be judged according to
what their authors claimed them to be doing. When the claim falls 100%
flat, why not say so?
I add that the prior title of this thread was misleading even according
to Loosemore's stated view: Loosemore's argument really seems to be that
Granger's work is decent neuroscience but bogus cognitive science...
Another hair splendidly sliced down the middle. Thanks.
Richard Loosemore
-- Ben
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